The Food

Hi There! You have actually found my old blog, so c’mon over and check out the new place – The Creekside Cook

Lots of fresh recipes and sweet garden inspiration every week!

Why do I like to cook? I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know how. As the oldest of 5 kids, I began learning early. My Mom was and is a great cook, but she didn’t mind handing off some of the day to day stuff to me when I was capable of it. The first thing I remember cooking by myself was Macaroni and Cheese. As I recall, it was awesome.

For a long time, I cooked to feed a growing family on a budget that never stretched quite as far as I would have liked. A lot of my cooking is still influenced by the frugality I had to follow during those years. I hate wasting food and work really hard to make sure that everything gets used. It has to be delicious though.

Now, I can explore my creativity. I am just feeding two people most of the time, and neither of us is very picky. No one turns their nose up saying, “Do we have to have zucchini again?”. I have the time and funds to experiment a little more. My only constraint is my own imagination. Unless I mention getting a specific recipe from another person, all recipes on this blog are my own creations – inasmuch as that is possible. Do I really think no one has ever made a lemon brownie before? Hardly, but the recipe here is one of my own making. You are more than welcome to use my recipes of course – that is why I share them – but I would appreciate a mention if you blog about them. Photographs may only be used by permission.

If I have a philosophy about food it is that life is made much more enjoyable when the food is good and even more so when you share it with people you love. Certainly, I like local sources. My favorite local source is the garden my husband grows right here in our own backyard. I cook out of it all summer, preserve out of it all fall and then spend the rest of the year emptying the freezer and pantry, only to begin again the following spring.

Cooking isn’t hard – at least it doesn’t have to be. Complicated meals can be fun sometimes, but to get something delicious on the table 5 or 6 nights every week, most of us need to keep it pretty simple. Feeding the people you love with food you made yourself, instead of getting it out of box or bringing it home from the local burger place – that, to me, is what cooking is all about. We can do it together.

In switching over here from Blogger, I am working to get things categorized better and all of the recipes in an easily printable form. It’s coming, I promise.